Like the Ku Klux Klan, the "Silver Shirts" is, or was, a real white supremacist, antisemitic organization (131). Its official name was the Silver Legion of America, but its nickname acknowledges its ideological indebtedness to Brown Shirts in Germany, the fascist group that helped bring Hitler and the Nazis to power in the 1930s. It was founded in North Carolina in early 1933. Clarence Snopes is "one of the first in Mississippi to join it" (131), believing, the narrator suggests, that it will outlast "the old Klan which he had wrecked" (132). It did grow during the 1930s, and its founder ran for President of the U.S. as a third-party candidate in 1936, but the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941 quickly resulted in its demise.